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It’s now been three years
since a people smuggler’s boat loaded with Illegal Maritime Arrivals (IMAs)
reached Australia.

Operation
Sovereign Borders (OSB) has been an outstanding success thanks to the
dedication and determination of the men and women of the 16 Commonwealth
agencies that make up the Joint Agency Task Force implementing OSB.

Boats were
arriving at the rate of 37 a month in early 2013 and over the preceding five
year period there were more than 800 of them carrying over 50,000 IMAs.

Dealing with
those people has cost the Australian taxpayer more than $14 billion to date.
These costs continue to mount as the current Government deals with what’s known
as the ‘Legacy Caseload’ – the 30,000 IMAs who arrived, but were not processed
by the previous administrations.

Had the
Coalition not mounted OSB – the boats and illegal arrivals would still be
coming.

OSB’s success
has been achieved at a time of unprecedented mass movement of people with an
estimated 65 million displaced persons worldwide.

There were many
who said it couldn’t be done. That turning-back boats was an impossibility,
that there was no way to end the people smuggling trade. The chorus was loud
and constant.

Fortunately for
Australia, the naysayers were wrong. We have stopped the relentless flow of
boats – but attempts to breach our borders remain.

Three years on,
the danger is that as a nation we now become complacent. Problem fixed, move
on. It was the mistake that was made in 2008.

We cannot
afford to do that again.

The reality is
that the boats have continued to try to breach the border protection measures
in place under OSB – though at vastly lower numbers.

Since the last
successful people smuggling boat arrived in July 2014, OSB has stopped 18 boats
carrying 361 potential IMAs. These boats have been turned-back where it was
safe to do so or their occupants were returned via air.

Importantly
there have been no lives lost at sea en-route to Australia in that time.

With the
support of our international partners we have also seen 539 people smugglers
arrested across our region as part of OSB, significantly crippling these
criminal networks.

But today
somewhere in South or South East Asia a people smuggler is contemplating how
the organised criminal ring he is a part of can entice people to pay to board a
boat and take the risk that they can survive a dangerous journey, on an
unseaworthy craft, to try to reach Australia.

The smugglers
watch and wait for any circumstance in Australian domestic politics that they
can exploit to claim the seaway to Australia is “open” again.

The number of
people waiting in Indonesia alone is estimated at 14,000. There are many
thousands more in other countries across the region that would be prepared to
undertake an illegal venture by sea.

We cannot
return to the days when Labor enabled people smugglers to usurp the Australian
Government and decide who could come to Australia.

Secure borders,
as Europe has learned at great cost, are an important part of national
security.

It is a
concerning fact that a large number of IMAs who could afford to pay the people
smugglers to bring them illegally to Australia arrived here without any
identification. They needed identity documentation to fly into Indonesia, but
disposed of it on the sea journey to Australia. Why?

We have every
right to know who wants to come to our country and to control how and when.

As we continue
to see in the Mediterranean, tens of thousands of people are prepared to
undertake dangerous journeys. More than 2300 have died on those journeys this
year while more than 5,000 were lost last year.

A few short
years ago people were dying in the oceans off Australia.

Australians
will never forget the horrifying scenes of a flimsy boat being dashed to pieces
on the rocks at Christmas Island in 2010, a tragedy which claimed 50 lives.

OSB has ended
those tragedies by cutting off the sea route to Australia. It has succeeded
where many said it could not, but that success is tested month by month.

We now have an
unprecedented number of surface, aerial and satellite surveillance assets
monitoring our maritime borders. OSB will be needed far into the future.

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